“. . . you might be too tired.”

“No way,” said Jack. “I’ve stayed up all night before.”

“You did not,” said Phoebe. “It was a sleepover at Zack’s house and he said he did but he totally didn’t.”

“Did!”

“Shut up!”

“Come on,” said Carmen. “They won’t let you in the hospital if you’re fighting.”

She hadn’t been expecting that to work, but as they reached the automatic doors, they fell quiet. It did, thought Carmen, have a similar feel to school when you thought about it.

The maternity unit was silent at that time of night, as if most people had somehow managed to decide not to have their babies at such an inconvenient time of year, and there were certainly no other children there. It struck Carmen forcibly how her extremely organized sister had, for the first time in her life, managed to do something completely disorganized.

The nurse on reception nodded. “She’s gone straight to delivery suite six,” she said. “We can’t let you all in . . . but she shouldn’t be by herself.”

“I can watch the others,” said Pippa.

“Hmm. Maybe not,” said the nurse. “But let me show you the waiting room.”

To the children’s absolute delight—it was a very new and shiny hospital—there was a waiting room with children’s toys piled up and a television tuned to a cartoon channel. There was also a vending machine selling an array of absolute crap. They looked at Carmen wide-eyed. This was clearly heaven itself.

Carmen looked at them all. Even Pippa seemed to be relaxing her stance as commander in chief to examine a pony you could bounce up and down on. She stood at the door. She was agonizingly close to the delivery suites; she could even hear the unpleasant noises.

It was so odd. Every time Sofia had had a baby, she hadn’t even thought about it, not really. Just a sense of “oh God, here we go, now Sofia is going to get all the attention again.”

Then the baby would arrive, and once again her parents would go mad for it, and the looks at Carmen would start and people would try to make nice remarks about her career, and it had built up and built up and driven her mad over the years, made her turn against her own family, through jealousy and defensiveness of her own choices, which often hadn’t felt like choices at all.

But now her sister was in one of those rooms, all by herself, in pain, with nobody there to hold her hand.

“Okay, guys,” she said to the children. “I am nipping across to see your mum for five seconds. Can you all manage to sit here and not get kidnapped or spontaneously stabbed and not stick your fingers in the plug socket?”